MARY
MEEKE’S ‘SOMETHING
STRANGE’The Development of the Novel
and the Possibilities of the Imagination

Michael Page

The familiar story of the rise of the modern novel
has been told often enough that I need only briefly
summarise it here. Most narratives credit the printer
Samuel Richardson with initiating
the discourse of the modern novel when he published
Pamela in 1740, though it is hard to imagine
Defoe being left out of the conversation. What Richardson
did that made him so ‘modern’, and thus marked a
breakthrough, was to introduce psychological realism
into narrative fiction (a psychological realism,
do not forget, that was wish-fulfilment fantasy).
Soon after, Horace Walpole opened the modern conversation
up to the dark side of human psychology with The
Castle of Otranto (1764). What Walpole in effect
did was to suggest that the unconscious—the unknown,
terror, the sublime—was just as much a part of the
modern mind as the realism of Richardson. So at
this point the two sides of the creative discourse
of Modernity were set and the novel would become
the central literary form in which that conversation
took place. The two aspects of Modernity—consciousness
and the unconscious—were to be explored in depth,
sometimes oppositionally and sometimes, in the very
best of novels like The Brothers Karamazov or
Moby-Dick, in concert. So by the end of the
nineteenth century, American novelist Frank Norris
could declare, ‘naturalism [i.e. extreme realism]
is a form of romanticism [i.e. sublime imagination]’.
[1]

It wasn’t long after
Richardson and Walpole that the novel blossomed
in Western culture. The 1780s and ’90s saw an enormous
increase in the production of novels. Many factors
are included here, not the least of which is literacy.
However, as Clifford Siskin has pointed out, until
recently, ‘once we rise novelistically past Fielding,
Richardson, and Sterne, and the 1780s and ’90s come
into view, critical attention shifts to the supposedly
lyrical advent of Romanticism’. [2]
What Siskin is here suggesting is that the rise
of the novel parallels the rise of Romanticism,
that most potent expression of modern consciousness,
making it clear that the novel (and here is where
that often misleading differentiation between the
‘serious’ and the ‘popular’ begins to come in) is
not a separate or peripheral part of the conversation
of Romanticism, but central to it. Until recently,
the Romantic novel has been largely ignored because,
for the most part, it has been seen as mere ‘popular
fiction’—‘popular fiction’ being a catch-all term
for any fiction that presumably does not have the
psychological depth of ‘serious literature’. This
supposedly makes it more accessible to the ‘masses’
and therefore it can’t possibly have much to say.

What I have tried
to suggest in these opening paragraphs is that the
Romantic period is the time when the novel began
to take shape as a principal form of cultural expression
because it initiated the process of wedding the
psychological realism of Richardson with the imaginative
sublime of Walpole, thus helping to define modern
consciousness. Certainly with a writer like Dickens
this becomes quite clear. Unfortunately, imagination
has too often taken a back seat to realism and form
in literary studies. Consequently, works described
as ‘imaginative literature’ are deemed ‘popular’
and therefore vulgar and/or shallow. As a result,
most of the fiction of the Romantic period has been
glossed over or just plain forgotten. But the Romantic
period is in truth one of the most fertile periods
in the development of the novel.

Working within this
novelistic ferment were a number of female novelists,
subsequently ignored because of their gender, not
the quality of their work, and who are now re-emerging
on the scholarly scene. Not the least of these is
Mary Meeke, whose output of thirty-four novels (including
many four-deckers that would amount to a 700-plus-page
novel today) and numerous translations from French
and German over a twenty-year period is in itself
worthy of study simply for the insight it can provide
regarding the literary marketplace. Indeed, Roberta
Magnani has shown that Meeke was likely the most
prolific novelist in the Romantic period, even exceeding
Sir Walter Scott. [3]
Meeke would certainly qualify as a writer of ‘popular
fiction’ and it is unfortunate that because of this
label she has all but disappeared from literary
history. Thomas Babington Macaulay was immensely
fond of her work, as was Mary Russell Mitford, but
beyond that she was already forgotten by the Victorians
(at least as indicated by those canonical figures
who wrote and published literary memoirs and letters).
Nevertheless, Meeke clearly had a readership in
her day given her output; and since most people
don’t write about what they read, at least not for
publication, who is to say that Meeke’s readers
didn’t extend on through the nineteenth century?
Today, for example, Grace Livingston Hill’s romances
of the 1920s and ’30s still circulate frequently
at public libraries in the United States, but seldom
is she mentioned in literary circles. We could say
that there is no ‘scholarly discourse’ surrounding
her work. But any series of observations at a public
library, systematic or casual, would reveal what
we could describe as a ‘popular discourse’. Arguably,
Meeke’s work may have had similar cultural distribution,
except, unlike Hill, she has fallen out of print.

Most of Mary Meeke’s
novels were published under the by-line ‘Mrs. Meeke’,
but since her output was so prolific, she also published
many under the pseudonym ‘Gabrielli’ and some of
her works were published anonymously, though they
are traceable by references to other titles on the
title page. Magnani has investigated Meeke’s by-lines
in her recent Cardiff Corvey article ‘The
Mysterious Mrs Meeke’, suggesting that Meeke may
have used the ‘threefold authorship’ as a way to
combat criticism regarding the repetitiveness and
contrivance of the plots. [4]
But this argument suggests that Meeke is trying
to deflect the harsh opinion of reviewers rather
than simply using pseudonyms as a way to get her
works on the fiction market. Many prolific writers
today still use this tactic, sometimes as a way
to distinguish two different styles of their writing,
often so as not to over-saturate the market. Meeke,
then, can be seen as a case study on how the institution
of the literary marketplace first developed at the
end of the eighteenth century. Although Meeke has
a lot to offer as a sociological study of the literary
marketplace, literacy, and the development of popular
fiction, her actual fiction deserves analysis too.
What kind of stories was she telling and why did
people read them? Was her ‘popular’ approach to
the imagination merely ‘pure trash of the commercial
variety’, [5]
or did her novels ‘play their part in expressing
something of the prevailing Zeitgeist of
the age which produced the Romantic poets’? [6]
Finally, did she contribute anything to the development
of the novel and is she still worth reading today?

Let us consider Meeke’s
four-decker novel Something Strange, published
by the Minerva Press in 1806, when Meeke’s production
was in full swing. First, some background. Something
Strange is one of the later ‘Gabrielli’ novels;
Meeke was by this time moving away from the Radcliffean
gothics of her earlier career into fiction that
is more about the concerns of the emerging commercial
class, an important consideration in Something
Strange. The novel hinges on what has been called
‘the basic inheritance plot’, [7]
which Meeke employed again and again in her novels
and which I will describe in full later in this
essay. In a more sophisticated manner, Meeke’s contemporary
Jane Austen wrote her canonical novels around the
same basic concern. By the time she published Something
Strange, Meeke had already published at least
half of her thirty-four novels. The novel received
one notice in James Mill’s Literary Journal,
in which the reviewer gives a fresh response, suggesting
that he has not previously encountered any of the
other ‘Gabrielli’ novels and is not therefore jaded
by the repetitious plot structure. He writes: ‘It
is written with some spirit and humour, and will
not suffer by a comparison with most of the novels
of the day’. [8]
From this we can see that the reviewer found Meeke’s
novel satisfying and that John Garrett is correct
in saying that while Meeke’s works ‘may often fail
to move, they seldom cease to entertain’. [9]
Nevertheless, the reviewer also reveals his own
elitist perspective in differentiating the ‘popular’
from the ‘serious’: ‘The person who chose the title
seems to have understood the taste of the multitude.
Let them have something strange, and they will never
inquire whether it be in the smallest degree consonant
to nature or common sense’. [10]
Here we see the standards of literary taste being
put into place that will shape the canon for the
next two centuries. Such standards have silenced
many voices and lost many texts that are only now
re-emerging in the cultural conversation.

Indeed,
Something Strange is an extremely rare title.
In Frederick Frank’s bibliography, The First
Gothics, it is not among the nine Meeke novels
surveyed. The gothic enthusiast Montague Summers
described the problem inherent in gothic bibliographic
research as long ago as the 1930s in The Gothic
Quest, repeatedly alluding to the rarity of
titles even then before the disasters of the Blitz.
The books just simply no longer existed either through
attrition (meaning they were read to tatters); through
disinterest (meaning they were simply thrown out);
or through the inherent problems of the multi-volume
format (meaning there are difficulties in keeping
a complete set together over time—if you lose volume
two, why keep volumes one, three, and four?). Curiously,
Something Strange is one of the handful of
titles mentioned in the Meeke entry in the recent
Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English,
which suggests that the contributor simply selected
titles from Meeke’s oeuvre at random, or
had read extensively and Something Strange had
left an impression as one of her best works. Whatever
the case may be, Something Strange is simply
unavailable in book form: there is no copy listed
in the OCLC WorldCat database. [11]

Fortunately, Die
Fürstliche Bibliothek (Princely Library) at Schloss
Corvey in Germany and the invaluable Corvey Microfiche
Edition have reintroduced this and many other lost
works from the Romantic period to the scholarly
community. [12]
In The Size of Thoughts (1996) and Double
Fold (2001), novelist Nicholson Baker has campaigned
passionately for the necessity of library preservation
and conservation, arguing why we must do our best
to save cultural documents in their original forms.
[13]
For Baker these documents are the very lifeblood
of culture, no matter how obscure, and to lose one
is to silence a voice and diminish the voices of
those to come. The library in Schloss Corvey is
a testament to why these issues and Baker’s passionate
arguments are so important. Without the Corvey Library,
Something Strange would simply not exist
and that aspect of the conversation of which this
essay, Roberta Magnani’s article, the text of the
novel, and the entry in the Cambridge Guide are
a part, would be rendered silent. Luckily, it is
possible not only to preserve this forgotten novel,
but to reintroduce it into the cultural conversation.

One way to reintroduce
a forgotten writer into the cultural conversation
is to trace that writer in the conversations of
canonical figures. Meeke’s reputation has largely
been sponsored by Thomas Babington Macaulay’s enthusiasm
for her works: ‘I wish that I knew where my old
friend Mrs. Meeke lives. I would certainly send
her intelligence of the blessed effects of her writings’.
[14]
In several letters to his sisters, Macaulay makes
numerous references to Meeke as one of his favourite
writers. Subsequent biographical entries on Meeke
in various literary encyclopaedias have too often
read these anecdotes in a negative light, giving
the impression that Macaulay’s enthusiasm for Meeke
was merely a guilty, vulgar pleasure and not a true
reflection of his own literary tastes. [15]
This reading arises from a passage in The Life
and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1876) by Macaulay’s
nephew G. O. Trevelyan who quotes his mother’s
(the former Hannah Macaulay) reminiscences of her
brother’s fondness for Mrs Meeke:

Macaulay thought it probable that he could rewrite
‘Sir Charles Grandison’ from memory, and certainly
he might have done so with his sister’s help. But
his intimate acquaintance of a work was no proof
of its merit. ‘There was a certain prolific author,’
says Lady Trevelyan, ‘named Mrs. Meeke, whose romances
he all but knew by heart; though he quite agreed
in my criticism that they were one just like another,
turning on the fortunes of some young man in a very
low rank of life who eventually proves to be the
son of a duke. [16]

Here we are also
introduced to the notion of the basic inheritance
plot that has led critics to dismiss Meeke as an
uninteresting hack—hack she may be, but far from
uninteresting. This criticism in fact becomes less
problematic if we approach a novel like Something
Strange by itself. Alone, Something Strange
is compelling and satisfying, as is an individual
work of Austen or Dickens. Certainly if we were
to read many of Meeke’s novels consecutively it
might prove tiresome, but isn’t that the case with
any writer? Take Hemingway, for example. In other
words, even the most specialised reader of fiction
likes variation from time to time because otherwise
the imagination becomes dulled. At the same time,
there is something to be said for stories that are
‘one just like another’. This is, after all, part
of the attraction of detective fiction, for example.
With this in mind, Meeke can be seen as a proto-genre
writer. Through her and her many contemporaries
we see the emergence and development of popular
genre fiction which holds much more cultural currency
than we like to give it credit for. Many readers
return to the same type of story again and again—be
it horror (Stephen King), thriller (John Grisham),
romance (Barbara Cartland), western (Louis L’Amour),
action (Tom Clancy), science fiction (Anne McCaffrey),
mystery (Agatha Christie), or even ‘serious literature’
(Salman Rushdie)—because the fictiontranslates
into how they shape their own personal identity
and how they interpret the world around them. Macaulay
clearly saw Meeke’s novels in this light. His incessant
reading of her work most certainly was a touchstone
as to how he saw himself in the world.

In many ways Something
Strange reads like a Dickens novel. The narrative
style seems to anticipate the methods of Victorian
fiction and is unlike the canonical and semi-canonical
novels of the Romantic period. It particularly anticipates
Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit and Nicolas
Nickleby, which are easily identifiable as inheritance
plot novels. Martin Chuzzlewit has been Dickens’s
most ignored novel for various reasons, not the
least of which being his scathing criticisms of
America and Americans. Nevertheless, Chuzzlewit
contains some of Dickens’s most delightful characters—Pecksniff,
Sari Gamp, Tom Pinch, immediately come to mind.
David Lodge describes his own experience with Chuzzlewit
while adapting it for a television serial: ‘it
so happened that Martin Chuzzlewit was, at
that date, the only one I had never read—partly
because it is not highly rated by modern critics
of Dickens and seldom studied in English Literature
courses’. [17]
This from a man who had taught courses on Dickens.
Lodge goes on to tell how he found Chuzzlewit
ideally suited for cinematic adaptation, the
structure being more akin to the visual medium,
and how he discovered that despite some flaws, the
novel more than stood up to Dickens’s usual list
of ‘best’ books: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield,
Bleak House, Great Expectations. One gets the
same sense from Something Strange. My point
is that Meeke’s popular fiction is anticipating
the decades in which the novel would totally eclipse
poetry as the primary medium of cultural expression.
Chuzzlewit has been ignored because it falls
between Dickens’s early work, like Oliver Twist
(also an inheritance novel), and the later,
darker novels, like Great Expectations (also
a sort of inheritance novel). But Chuzzlewit
is the beginning of Dickens’s great middle period
when he was still closer to an idealistic Romantic
than a defeated Victorian. This Romanticism runs
throughout the novels beginning with Chuzzlewit,
A Christmas Carol, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield,
and even on to Hard Times. These novels
in particular can be seen to be operating in a manner
similar to Meeke’s Something Strange. So,
in this respect, what makes Something Strange
such a good novel is that it bridges the gap
between the leisurely storytelling that makes so
many eighteenth-century novels slow going and the
faster paced modern narrative much more suited to
today’s reader. Few can deny that one of Dickens’s
800-pagers is far easier (and much more fun) to
read than Goldsmith’s 150-page TheVicar
of Wakefield. Something changed between Goldsmith’s
1760s and Dickens’s 1830s, and Meeke’s narrative
gives us a great deal of insight as to when that
change took place.

Lady Trevelyan’s
plot description does, however, succinctly describe
the plot of Something Strange. Nonetheless,
Meeke’s inheritance plot seems to be moving forward
beyond the Gothic and anticipating something new,
something more modern: that is what we see in Dickens
during Lord Macaulay’s own time. I will briefly
summarise the story here. Theodore Seymour is the
principal student at Atherstone House school in
Wakefield, Yorkshire. Abandoned by his profligate
father while still an infant, following the unfortunate
death of his misused mother, Theodore has been maintained
by his miserly Uncle Benjamin, who manages a small
legacy left for the boy by his mother’s family.
As events unfold, we find out that Theodore’s mother
was the daughter of a Portuguese Marchioness and
an English Duke, who were divorced due to religious
incompatibilities and sexual infidelity on the part
of the Marchioness. Raised incognito away from her
zealous mother, the daughter, Theodora St. Germains,
was seduced by Henry Seymour, an English soldier
driven by a desire for fortune. From this ill-fated
liaison Theodore was born and in order to keep the
boy’s legacy out of the hands of his grasping father
and his soul out of the hands of his fanatical grandmother,
his grandfather, the Duke of Ravensburgh, leaves
him in the condition of anonymity until his coming
of age when he will no longer be legally bound to
his father. The plot hinges on the intrigues, deceits,
and turns of fate that reveal the circumstances
and ultimate claiming of the legacies to which Theodore
Seymour is entitled.

Sound at all familiar?
Harry Potter? Indeed, the same story elements that
have made the Harry Potter novels so compelling
for children and adults alike are present in Something
Strange, and by inference in Meeke’s other novels
that hinge on the inheritance plot. As Magnani puts
it, ‘The theme of the abandoned child, whose virtuous
life and fine education are finally rewarded with
the improvement or restoration of his rank, and
his social and economic status, is reprocessed in
a variety of shapes’. [18]
What then is the inheritance plot other than a variation
of the archetypal messiah theme: the gifted chosen
one come to save the world. Meeke’s novel is not
quite as boldly archetypal as, say, Arthurian Romance,
The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Harry
Potter: Theodore’s is not the task to save the world
from the forces of evil, but only to lay claim to
his rightful place in society. Or so it seems. If
we consider Something Strange within the
context of its times, perhaps the story is closer
to the messiah archetype than one might initially
suspect.

Consider the historical
and social context of Something Strange:the novelwas published in 1806 and one
of its appeals is the amount of unencumbered travel
that the characters engage in throughout England
and Continental Europe. The characters are constantly
on the move and there are few barriers placed in
their path. It seems that they are able to move
around at will and no one, most notably M. Bonaparte,
seems to stand in their way. One must ask, though,
what about Napoleon? What about the aftermath of
the French Revolution? Have the events of the last
twenty years had no effect upon the Europe of Something
Strange? The story is clearly meant to be contemporary,
yet the world is strangely untouched by current
events. It is indeed something strange. We must
step back for a moment and ask why? Why in this
realistic novel (realistic in that there are no
supernatural events) have the realities of the contemporary
world been left out? This was not unusual in the
fiction of the time, as Stephen Behrendt has pointed
out:

The Romantic novel offered its readers very desirable
choices among alternative realities, whether
those alternatives took the form of gaudy Gothic
romances set in remote times and places or sentimental
social romances into whose edenic settings no ‘ancestral
voices prophesying war’ were admitted. In this respect
some of the most signal Romantic novels may be said
to reflect their time by their specific and systematic
banishment of those times from their pages. [19]

What Behrendt is suggesting is that the imaginative
flight into alternate realities is in some
sense a political response to the upheavals of Europe.
We need to look at the situation with Napoleon very
closely for a possible explanation for what Meeke
is doing in her novel.

Napoleon was proclaimed
emperor in the spring of 1804. By 1805, he had made
himself King of Italy, formed an alliance with Spain,
and provoked England, Austria, and Russia into an
alliance to thwart his further expansionist agenda.
In October of that year, Nelson’s fleet was victorious
at Trafalgar, securing the seas for the English
and forcing Napoleon to pursue his aggressions on
land alone. Nelson’s death at the moment of victory
created a hero that defined stability and tradition
in opposition to the demonic, revolutionary, anti-hero
that Napoleon had become. [20]

By writing about
English aristocrats and ignoring the political and
social upheavals in Europe, Meeke is actually expressing
patriotism and cultural stability—the superiority
of English society and its institutions over Napoleon
and his regime—at a time when the security and safety
of England was at risk of being overwhelmed by the
French threat. Her fiction was no doubt comforting
to readers whose anxiety about the future was certainly
great. Thus, Something Strange, and works
like it, were instrumental in shaping English identity—what
it meant to be English—when the future of that identity
was in crisis. In his autobiography Voyage to
a Beginning, present-day novelist and philosopher
Colin Wilson expressed the importance of the BBC
broadcasts of Shakespeare and Shaw during the Blitz
because it instilled a sense of courage and fortitude
through cultural identity; people found comfort
in their own identity with these great writers and
their work. [21]
The same argument can be made for Something Strange
and other novels of the Romantic period in that
they helped shape a clearly defined English cultural
identity in opposition to that of their French adversary.

Meeke’s novel is
also providing an emotive release from the realities
of the world, not unlike fiction and film today.
Fiction (and poetry) may also function as an emotional
outlet, a stimulus for catharsis. Fiction and the
reading experience are often just as much about
feeling as about thinking. Great works are able
to combine the two, but for many readers the emotive
values are all they are looking for, and this serves
an important social function. An interesting study
on recent romance fiction, Janice Radway’s Reading
the Romance (1984), offers a great deal
of insight into this phenomenon. While studying
the reading habits of a group of women in a midwestern
American city, Radway discovered that the act
of reading was more important to the readers
than the meaning of the text, and that the fiction
needed to be investigated in light of these values
(reader response) rather than by critical values
(textual analysis):

Because the women always responded to my query
about their reasons for reading with comments about
the pleasures of the act itself rather than about
their liking for the particulars of the romantic
plot, I soon realized I would have to give up my
obsession with textual features and narrative details
if I wanted to understand their view of romance
reading. Once I recognized this it became clear
that romance reading was important to the Smithton
women first because the simple event of picking
up a book enabled them to deal with the particular
pressures and tensions encountered in their daily
round of activities. Although I learned later that
certain aspects of the romance’s story do help to
make the event especially meaningful, the early
interviews were interesting because they focused
so resolutely on the significance of the act
of romance reading rather than on the meaning
of the romance. [22]

It is easy to make
the argument that this is to be expected because
of the apparent depthlessness of the stories, but
I would counter-argue that one could extrapolate
Radway’s conclusion to all types and all levels
of reading. Whether one is reading Tolstoy or Batman,
Sartre or Seuss, the act of reading is significant
to how we create meaning, even when the act itself
is the meaning. And this very act of reading, employing
the imagination as opposition to the realities of
the social world, can be seen as a subversive act
in and of itself. (It can also be a conservative
act of cultural, mental, and moral stasis, as Radway
also suggests.) Seen in this light, Meeke’s apparent
conservatism—‘They enforce passive obedience and
assert the values of the aristocracy, and can be
connected with the increasing dominance of conservative
values in the fiction of the early 19th century’
(Lorna Sage)—suddenly appears far less assertable.
[23]

Was Meeke, then,
a conservative? In a political sense the answer,
perhaps, is yes. But this must be qualified when
we consider the embedded opposition to Napoleon’s
aggressions. Economically, perhaps; though I have
only implied it here, Meeke clearly favours the
old aristocracy and has suspicions and doubts about
the emerging commercial world as witnessed by the
chicanery of the brothers Seymour, though this is
tempered by Theodore’s worthy companions Lambert
and Chenvier, both sons of commercial figures. At
the same time however, Meeke, as popular novelist,
is herself a member of this emerging commercial
class: her critics have consistently denigrated
her for her playing to the whims of the literary
marketplace. And as novelist, she champions the
imagination as a valuable and necessary mode of
expressing human consciousness and self-identity,
and this, in an age when literacy was on the rise,
is difficult to call conservative. Contemporaneous
with Meeke, the Marquis de Sade had this to say
about the novel as imaginative expression:

Of what use are novels? Of what use, indeed!
Hypocritical and perverse men, for you alone ask
this ridiculous question: they are useful in portraying
you as you are, proud creatures who wish to elude
the painter’s brush, since you fear the results,
for the novel is—if ’tis possible to express oneself
thuswise—the representation of secular customs,
and is therefore, for the philosopher who wishes
to understand man, as essential as is the knowledge
of history. [24]

As literacy increased and the social world became
more complex, the possibilities of the imagination
expanded dramatically. No longer was human consciousness
locked into a narrow tunnel: ideas were in ferment
on all levels of society and change was inevitable.
As De Sade suggests, the novel became the medium
through which this new consciousness was explored.
The novel becomes the project of the imagination,
and it is through imagination that the social world
is transformed. Charlotte Smith’s Desmond
(1792) contains this insight on the novel voiced
by her female heroine Geraldine Verney:

It may be said, that, if they do no good, they
do no harm; and that there is a chance, that
those who will read nothing, if they do not read
novels, may collect from them some few ideas, that
are not either fallacious or absurd, to add to the
very scanty stock which their usual insipidity of
life has afforded them. [25]

This discourse runs
throughout the novels of the period; they are rife
with intertextuality, the supposed reserve of ‘postmodern’
novels. But novelistic self-reflectivity is there
from the very beginning, as seen in Smith and De
Sade. Though not directly engaging this discourse
as did Smith and De Sade, Meeke participated by
the very production of novels within the marketplace
of ideas. Like these more notable contemporaries,
Meeke’s novels are part of the foundation upon which
this discourse can take place. Her work extends
the discourse into the future so that one can very
well imagine a volume of Meeke, perhaps Something
Strange, providing comfort, fortitude, and instruction
to little David Copperfield (let alone Lord Macaulay)
as he suffered at the hands of the indifferent and
malicious Murdstone’s:

My father had left a small collection of books
in a little room upstairs, to which I had access
(for it adjoined my own), and which nobody else
in our house ever troubled. From that blessed room,
Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker,
Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote,
Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious
host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy,
and my hope of something beyond that place and time—they,
and the Arabian Nights, and the Tales
of the Genii—and did me no harm, for whatever
harm was in some of them was not there for me; I
knew nothing of it. [26]

Like Dickens in this, one of his most moving passages,
Meeke achieves with Something Strange that
rare quality of taking the reader on a delightful
imaginary tour of one aspect of the early nineteenth
century novelistic discourse on the imagination.
By telling her tale well and providing all of those
cathartic, emotive moments one gets from really
effective fiction, Meeke is able to expand our notions
of literature and the imagination. This in itself
is a worthy legacy for a novel, alas long forgotten.
Though Something Strange does not reach the
level of a great novel like David Copperfield,
it is, nevertheless, a valuable reading experience.
In the end, Mary Meeke’s legacy, as one of many
representative popular writers from the Romantic
period who have until recently been lost under the
weight of the canon, may simply rest on how she
sheds light on the development of the novel as a
forum for the formation of personal and cultural
identity. As further recovery efforts proceed, and
more scholars examine her works, we will begin to
determine which of her many novels are most significant.
It may turn out that Something Strange is
given this honour, but there is much more work to
be done.

15. See
e.g. the Dictionary of National Biography;Kunitz,
British Authors of the Nineteenth Century; Joanne Shattock,
The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (Oxford and New
York: OUP, 1993); Todd, British Women Writers.

16. The
Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (London: Longman, 1876),
p. 129.

REFERRING
TO THIS ARTICLEM. PAGE. ‘Mary Meeke’s Something Strange:
The Development of the Novel and the Possibilities of
the Imagination’, Cardiff Corvey: Reading the Romantic
Text 11 (Dec 2003). Online: Internet (date accessed):
<http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/corvey/articles/cc11_n01.html>.

CONTRIBUTOR
DETAILS Michael Page is a PhD student at the
University of Nebraska–Lincoln, specialising in nineteenth-century
British literature. His current projects involve the literary
response to nineteenth-century science and popular fiction
during the Romantic period.